Speaking and Being Heard: How Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations Gain Attention on Social Media

Abstract

Social media offer an alternative broadcast and communication medium for nonprofit advocacy organizations. Yet the social media era also ushers in an increasingly “noisy” information environment that renders it more difficult for any given organization to make its voice heard. How then can an organization gain attention on social media? We address this question by building and testing a model of the effectiveness of the Twitter use of advocacy organizations. Using number of retweets and number of favorites as proxies of attention, we test our hypotheses with a 12-month panel dataset that collapses by month and organization the 219,915 tweets sent by 145 organizations in 2013. We find that attention is strongly associated with the size of an organization’s network, its frequency of speech, and the number of conversations it joins. We also find a seemingly contradictory relationship between different measures of attention and an organization’s targeting and connecting strategy.

Keywords: advocacy, attention, nonprofit organizations, social media, Twitter

JEL Classification: H83, L31, O33